Justin Amash Continues To Blast Donald Trump, Support Impeachment On Twitter
On Saturday, Republican Representative Justin Amash’s 13-tweet thread made him the first Republican lawmaker to support President Donald Trump’s impeachment, per The Inquisitr. Now, following Trump’s claims that he is a “total lightweight” and a “loser,” Amash appears to be doubling down on his criticism.
Amash — who isn’t ruling out a potential 2020 presidential run as a Libertarian candidate — posted a series of tweets that go into deeper detail as to why he believes Trump should be impeached for obstruction of justice, per The Hill.
“People who say there were no underlying crimes and therefore the president could not have intended to illegally obstruct the investigation—and therefore cannot be impeached—are resting their argument on several falsehoods.”
According to Amash, the first falsehood is that there are no underlying crimes. He points to the fact that Robert Mueller’s investigation revealed multiple crimes, and although only some led to charges, the report nonetheless describes them.
Amash says that the second falsehood is the assumption that obstruction of justice requires an underlying crime, which he points out is false. He highlights the fact that, in some cases, prosecutors cannot charge a crime because the obstruction itself prevented them from obtaining the necessary evidence for prosecution.
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) May 20, 2019
The Republican congressman then suggested that it’s not true that the president should be able to end a potentially frivolous investigation because he couldn’t possibly know that every person investigated in Mueller’s report was innocent.
Finally, Amash touches on the implication that high crimes and misdemeanors must lead to criminal charges.
“In fact, ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ is not defined in the Constitution and does not require corresponding statutory charges. The context implies conduct that violates the public trust — and that view is echoed by the Framers of the Constitution and early American scholars.”
Amash’s detailed tweets are not out of the ordinary, as he is known to explain every vote he makes via social media. He also has a history of criticizing Trump — he previously slammed the president’s decision to declare a national emergency to secure funding for a wall — and also pointed out the perceived hypocrisy of Congressional Republicans that criticized President Obama for executive overreach.
As The Inquisitr reported, Amash used his March appearance on CNN’s State of the Union to reveal that he believes that the U.S. Congress is currently “broken.”
“Right now we have a wild amount of partisan rhetoric on both sides and Congress is totally broken. We can’t debate things in a clear way anymore.”
The libertarian-leaning Republican claims that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are productively debating things, and suggests that neither parties are providing a real vision to the American people.
